I’ve mentioned SymbioStock, the network of independent stock illustrators and photographers before, but things have continued to develop. First up – I got my first sale from my own SymbioStock site – BackyardStockPhotos. Now this is nothing to get excited about, but a buyer found my site, found the image they wanted, registered and bought/downloaded the image with no issues or fuss. It was this one: They bought a small version – which I priced at $3. As I said,...
I’m sure this has happened to you – you make an effort to go somewhere to get some fantastic sunset shots, but the weather is just not right – too cloudy, too hot, too misty, you name it, it has happened. One of the wonders of digital cameras is that they can often see an image better than you can, if you spend the time to get the best out of it. A recent trip to Newark (I know, I...
Somewhat belatedly, here are my earnings for July 2013 from the sale and licensing of stock images. Overall it was a pretty good month – not a record, but solidly above $2000 again. I ended the month with $2149 after counting the partner program earnings from iStock which came in on time this month. Shutterstock was its usual good performer at $924, iStock is struggling (apart from partner sales which are strong) and Alamy came out of its shell to...
Note: Significant updates to post following release of V2 of StockUploader. In my book, as well as in numerous posts on my blog, I have pushed the benefits of Lightburner – where you upload once to their site and they handle the uploads to all the stock agencies. I have also said that I would be willing to pay for the service as I found it so helpful. Well, my wish came true – they introduced a pricing plan, but...
Many people try to sell stock images from their own personal portfolio and website, but with very mixed results for a couple of reasons – the first is that there are few options for hosting such a site (there are a few paid packages around). The second, and most problematic, is that no-one know that you are there! Unless you can get your images in the first few rows of Google’s image search, then the chance of a buyer finding...
Another month, another set of earnings! June 2013 was nothing great – not bad, but certainly not breaking any records. Total earnings in the month were $1956, helped by a pretty good month at Shutterstock with a total of nine enhanced downloads in the month. With those licenses, I ended the month with $955 at Shutterstock. All the rest were so-so. IStock continued its decline, to $242, and that is with an estimate of their Partner Program earnings. For “technical...
A month of ups and downs to be honest! First the great news; I beat all previous records on income from Shutterstock with earnings in the month of $1004. The first time that I passed the $1000 stage. After a cold month without Enhanced license downloads in April, I ended the month of May with six of them. In addition, I had a great month for Single downloads as well, which all helped create this best ever month. I’ve been...
A pretty reasonable month, that puts me back into the $2000+ earning bracket this month – the final total was $2176. Not a best month (that record was set back in November with a total of $2233, but pretty close. What helped this month was a good performance from Shutterstock (aided by a couple of video footage downloads that together $110 – one of which being a skyline pan over Boston, which was probably used in connection with the recent...
I guess I need to brag from time to time, and I was very excited to receive an email from Amazon this morning featuring books about Stock Photography available on their site with my own book taking the prime position in the advert! Thanks to all my readers for the glowing reviews on Amazon – I am sure that had a lot to do with it. If you would like to add your own review on Amazon, please do so...
I blogged about this a couple of weeks back, but Leo (the designer behind the Symbiostock network) has been making remarkable progress and we now have a very substantial and flexible stock agency developing using WordPress. Two things of note – the first is that the site design is now much more professional – I hope you agree that my own stock photo agency BackyardStockPhotos.com would not deter anyone from moving forward to buying an image from me! The second...
